Our daughter was housesitting at this gated ranch in Tucson and we waited outside after our initial conversation.
She ended up locking herself in the house and asking us to call her landlord, who came down to help out. She also called the police who came and told us (which we already knew) that she was an adult and could make her own choices, but that they would go talk to her.
They were able to talk her out of the house and she came out the same time her landlord arrived. She agreed to go get an evaluation, but only if her landlord took her, not us, and report back to us later that day. And that is what happened.
My middle daughter went missing earlier this year. We believed she was in Tucson but had no communication for about 6 months. Her younger sister went to Tucson and found her. Her mother and I (we are divorced) followed a number of days later to talk to her about some issues.
Stop sign #8 – It costs too much. Answer: What is it you can’t afford? A point and shoot camera? A computer? Transportation? Membership fees? Be creative, find a camera at a pawn shop, or a resale shop. If you can’t afford a new computer, once again, find a refurbished one. Maybe trade services for what you need. You don’t have to go anywhere to create interesting photos, you have yourself as a subject, and you don’t have to travel to get there do you? You have your home, your yard, your sidewalk, your street signs.
I realized by having children that we are all capable of saying we don’t have the time or the money to do something. But I found out that without exception my children almost always found a way to do the things they REALLY wanted to do. That usually did not include cleaning out the garage with dad, so in that case they had too much homework. But a call from a friend to go to the movies, well, in that case, they realized they could do their homework when they got home, or in the morning. In other words, they WANTED to go to the movies, and found a way.
In other words, don’t say ‘I can’t afford it’. Say instead ‘HOW can I afford it?’ and go out and find the way.
Do you WANT to be a photographer, an artist, a creative person? Then you WILL find a way and you will not use excuses.
These were all taken on a brilliant October day in Luray, Virginia. My eldest daughter was getting married and some of our dearest friends took the day off and drove from Annapolis, MD to be there. This is a collage of the mother and the eldest daughter of that family. It includes the fabric from their dresses, a necklace, freckles and collarbones.
Way back when, in the 1980s, there was a very young and stylish guy who came to work at the restaurant where I worked, Eulipia. He was 18. We became friends over many years of working together. He moved down to LA eventually and I met him once down there for dinner with his girlfriend. They eventually married and he became a flight attendant on USAIR.
They settled in Annapolis, MD and many years later what should happen but my daughter attended St. John’s College in Annapolis. We reconnected with him and his family and my daughter ended up very close to them all, babysitting the young ones, staying at their home one summer, etc. We would visit whenever we came to town.
So, now that 18 year old kid who met my daughter when she was born, was at her wedding 18 years later with his wife and daughters who I was able to photograph. It was a great and glorious reminder of the beauty that is within the longevity of relationships.
Gordon Corbet Powell was my Uncle Bunny. He passed away this week, bringing back a flood of great memories of my childhood and young adulthood.
He was ‘Bunny’ because he was born on Easter Sunday and the nurse gave him to my grandmother saying ‘here is your little Easter bunny’ and the name stuck. When I was older he asked me and the family if maybe we could call him UB instead of Uncle Bunny, which we did sometimes.
He was a funny and eccentric character, a woodworker and engineer. Could fix and build most anything. One of my best memories as a kid was the boat/fort he built in his back yard (right around the corner from our house) for my cousin Jim, who is just a year younger than I am. This was a real solidly built building type fort in the shape of a boat, with a deck and bunks and a bridge to stand on top of and pretend to drive the boat.
They moved up to Mill Valley in Marin County, California in the 60’s and it was great fun to visit them there. Hiking up Mt. Tamapais and seeing ‘black bread’ in a little alpine restaurant on the way for the first time.
He founded the Marin Zeppelin Society, which was only open to people who had survived lighter than air disasters. Of course, since all who were alive had survived everything, anyone could join. It was a joke lost on some people. My father, who was in aviation his whole life, actually got the MZS group a ride on the Goodyear blimp and they got a certificate and everything. The group really was just an excuse to get together with a bunch of guys and shoot the breeze at a local diner.
He did fanagle Mill Valley into putting an MZS plaque on the entry marker to the town alongside the Rotary and Lions club plaques. That always cracked me up to go into town and see that.
He built a home in Mill Valley and around that time read about the ‘Aubrey holes’ surrounding stonehenge in the UK. They are holes filled with chalk in a perfect circle some distance from Stonehenge. They were discovered I think when a certain Mr. Aubrey was walking his dog and stuck his umbrella or cane into the dirt and it had chalk on the end of it. My uncle built an aubrey hole at his new house so he would have the only aubrey hole in the colonies. THAT was his sense of humor.
The photos above were taken in Estes Park, Colorado where he spent his summers with the rest of my mother’s side of the family. He later harness raced at the Del Mar racetrack in California.
He was a great uncle. I have wonderful memories of him.
Bruce Anderson was a fighter bomber pilot in WWII with the VSMC 243 Goldbricks, my father’s squadron. He was the flight officer, he got two distinguished flying crosses then, and another in Korea. He was very upset about the truce in Korea, we should have gone in and finished the job he thinks. Same with Vietnam. He lives in Florida with his wife of 60 years. His daughter came to the reunion from Utah, where she likes her Mormon neighbors.
This certificate was given to my father in 1956. I gave it to him again on Christmas Day, 2005, 49 years later. Here is the story of how it came about.
My father came to visit me in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma in August of 2005, in anticipation of his moving here permanently the next month.
He was pretty famous as an aviator over his career and so I thought it would be fun to ‘google’ him while he sat beside me at the computer. We did so and found all sorts of references to him and the airplane he flew in 1955, the XFY-1 Pogo, the first vertical take-off airplane.
Among the google references was an odd one from Geneology.com. All the entry said was ‘Has anyone ever heard of J.F. ‘Skeets’ Coleman?’ That was all. There was a response to it from someone who said he had heard of my dad because of some airplane boat car he had invented in the 50’s, which is true. Then there was another entry that said ‘I am his niece, and he lives in California with his daughter.’ We recognized the niece’s name (my cousin) of course.
I wrote another response that said ‘I am his son, and he is sitting right next to me as I right this in Oklahoma, where he will soon be moving. If I may enquire, why are you asking about him?’. The gentleman responded and said ‘I love to go into antique stores around where I live in Leesburg, Virginia and I see many certificates and documents with names on them and I often wonder who is that person, do they know the document is here, how did it get here?, etc.’. I happen to see a document that had your father’s name on it and thought I would ask around.’
I got the man’s personal email and started a correspondence. He remembered the certificate had and X on it, and his name but nothing else. He also wasn’t quite sure what antique store he had seen it in. I asked him to see if he could find it again for me. He came back a few days later and sent this photo with the name of the store.
I immediately called the store and purchased the certificate. It was hanging downstairs in the basement, in a dark corner, under a staircase! How he ended up seeing it, who knows.
We of course were wondering how and why it ended up in that store in Virginia of all places. Then I remembered that back in the 50’s we had moved to Hagarstown, Maryland in 1956, moving back to California in 1959. All we could figure is that somehow my mom and dad had left this certificate behind and it had found it’s way to the antique store eventually. My family also lived in Virginia (but farther away from Leesburg than Hagarstown is) in the early 70s and so it could have been left at that time as well.
The piece arrived well packed and my father actually took the delivery while I was at work. He wasn’t sure why I would get something from Leesburg though. I just told him it was some Christmas present I had ordered online and the main store was there.
I had it wrapped and under the tree for Christmas and gave it to him at the end of all the presents. It was from ‘Cyber Santa’. I told him the present came from Cyber Santa because without the internet we never would have found what he is about to get. I told him it was old but was one of a kind, only could be given to him and him alone. He is 87 now and I wasn’t sure if he would even know it had been missing for so long. But when he opened it he was very moved and exclaimed, ‘Where the hell has this been all these years’!
